* here's a helpful list of the Mignola-verse material in appropriate reading order from the writer Sean T. Collins. I suspect that's likely the best and grandest superhero comic of the 21st Century, but I'm not up enough on that material to know for sure.

* J. Caleb Mozzocco has a fun piece here on one of those teaser images that big publishers -- well, I think almost solely DC -- do. These are portentous images where you decipher visual clues as to forthcoming plotlines. Mozzocco points out two great things: one is that it's silly to call an image in a dozen comic books this week that can be immediately taken to another web site an exclusive; the other is that DC doesn't have a great record for sticking to narratives over the last few years, which makes this kind of thing even more dubious than usual. I find them pretty tiresome as an adult, but I still think I would have liked them a lot as a kid. Of course, if little-kid me felt I was being messed with, I would have been resentful and bailed.

* finally, here's a fun story by the great Steve Duin on a recently unearthed Alex Schomburg cover. Schomburg was the Golden Age cartoonist who did the covers that were just figure flying around all over the page -- if you had distinctive image of comics of those times that didn't involve Superman, it would probably be a Schomburg cover.